In China, Blunt Talk to Reporters on Access

For years, Western news organizations had tried to interpret the Chinese government’s position toward critical press coverage, sensing that Beijing would punish journalists for reports it did not like by miring visa requests in bureaucracy, or simply declining them.

On Wednesday, that position was stated in unusually blunt language. At a news conference in Beijing alongside President Obama, China’s leader, Xi Jinping, appeared to draw a link between unfavorable coverage and access for reporters, saying that the visa problems of news organizations were of their own making. “When a car breaks down on the road, perhaps we need to step down and see what the problem is,” he said.

Mr. Xi’s comments come as several journalists for The New York Times and other news organizations have been forced to cover the country from outside its borders, after producing articles that were embarrassing for the Chinese leadership. Last week, the Times columnist Nicholas Kristof revealed that he had been denied a visa, and five other Times journalists have not received visas after applying for them in recent years.

“Everyone has been aware that this was the policy,” said Joel Simon, the executive director of the advocacy group Committee to Protect Journalists, “and now it has been confirmed that there is an official state policy to discriminate against journalists who cover China critically.”

Mr. Xi’s comments formalize a shift in the Chinese government’s approach, said Orville Schell, the director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society, and a longtime scholar on China. “There is a fundamental contrast between Western notions of the role of the press as a watchdog institution and Chinese, Maoist notions of the press as essentially a megaphone of the party and state,” Mr. Schell said.

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When Xi Jinping became the president of China in 2013, New York Times reporters discussed his background.Published OnNov. 12, 2014CreditImage by Diego Azubel/European Pressphoto Agency

Over the last 20 or 30 years, he said, that distinction has been less defined, as the Chinese permitted more robust coverage by Western journalists. “But I think under Xi we’re beginning to get something of a return to a more traditional Maoist notion not only of the media, but of arts and culture.”

The Arab Spring of 2011 marked a turning point, said Evan Osnos, a staff writer for The New Yorker who until recently covered China for the magazine, and for The Chicago Tribune before that. Chinese leaders watched authoritarian governments fall with very little warning, he said, and decided that “there were all of these latent threats to their political stability that had to be controlled.”

The next year Bloomberg News published a report on the investments held by the family of Mr. Xi, and The Times reported on the vast wealth that the family of Wen Jiabao, then China’s prime minister, had accumulated — a particularly sensitive topic given China’s overt communism. The Times’s website has been blocked in China ever since.

Joseph Kahn, The Times’s assistant editor for international, and a former Beijing bureau chief, said that the paper is willing to work closely with Chinese authorities to resolve the visa issues. The country is important, he said, and a big part of the organization’s global report. “Allowing us to have a full complement of correspondents there will enhance our ability to tell China’s story fully and fairly,” he said.

Mr. Xi’s statement, Mr. Osnos said, had the potential to reset the way that news organizations deal with Chinese visa issues, and to remove some of the haziness that had been attached to them. “The traditional negotiating tactic when you’re dealing with the Chinese government,” he said, “would be don’t talk about it explicitly, don’t push it, because that constrains the way they deal with it.” It is now clear, he said, that “there is no best practice.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: In China, Blunt Talk to Reporters on Access. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe